I see the distinction as potentially useful. The agnostic fails to believe in god. The (strong) atheist believes that god does not exist. It is a logical distinction between '~B(p)' and 'B(~p).' The latter should imply the former, but the implication does not go the other way. It is possible, in theory, for an agnostic to be 0% convinced that god exists and 0% convinced that god does not exist.

At the CUNY Graduate Center, perhaps?

BTW, deontic logic is unrelated to the thread. Maybe doxastic/epistemic logic.

The term atheism when used to describe all people who don't believe in a God is just wrong.

Atheism is not a religion. Atheism is not a belief system. Atheism is nothing.

Calling non religion people atheists is the exact same as calling everyone who isn't racist non-racists.

Religion is a a concept made by religion itself. "Atheists" are out of the equation. Atheists are just people. Atheism does not define a person who has nothing to do with believing on God except to people who do believe in God.

Everyone who isn't racist is non-racist. To be 'non-racist' is merely to fail to be racist.

Atheism is often mistaken for something bad; really it’s not even a choice that a person makes.
People often choose to believe things whether or not they’re factual, and Atheists choose to not believe anything from lack of knowledge of what is truly reality.
Belief is a terrifying thing, it means that you trust without seeing and many people are okay with that, but some people are not.
God is a warped vision of what could be waiting for us after the only thing that is really promised to us, death. And after many years God has been turned into an image, and a figure, a life form when really in the beginning it was suppose to be nothing but the gathering of all things that give life, it’s the key definition of nature and balance, but God no matter how we try can really not be defined at all, but as humans we try and find ways of having things make sense, and God is what keeps many people from being lonely.

It does not take a lot of fate to be an atheist. I read your first post, and I think you are Christian. Nothing wrong with that, but do you, as Christian, know that god exists? If you know god exists, you also have to be all-knowing, because no man so far has ever seen god. So, you believe that god exists. And I, as an atheist, believe he doesn't. This does not mean I am against christianity as a whole, but I am against people that take certain bible passages and use them as an excuse for hating people. But enough about that. Let's talk about why I am an atheist.

Let's start off with the bible. As the people now know, the bible is filled with mistakes, calling a bat a bird, saying the sun revolves around the earth, saying the earth is flat, etc.. So, the bible isn't exactly the most reliable book on earth. Apart from the bible, Christians have nothing documented that proofs the existence of god. Which means that everything they base their entire belief on, is one book. Not only is that book unreliable; it has also been translated hundreds of times, also from english to english, because language changes. You can compare this to making a copy of a text on an old copying device. The first copy doesn't loose the big picture, but it does loose some of the details. Then you make a copy of that copy, and do that over 100 times. You will see that the text is faded away quite a bit then, even losing a quite a bit of the big picture.

Then, at the very beginning, it was written by people. People that the bible itself says are imperfect. From this we can conclude that the first bible wasn't reliable as well: The bible itself says so by saying people are imperfect and only god is perfect.

But what bothers me most about the bible is one certain passage, said by jesus: "There is no way to god but through me". Which basically means that you must accept jesus before you die and you can go to heaven. So, what's messed up with this?

Well, firstly, 2/3 of the world's population doesn't believe in the christian god. That means that, however good they have lived their lives, however many people they have helped, they will go to hell for not accepting jesus. This also includes people that have never even heard of the christian god. So they go to hell.

Then there are children. If a child dies, say, before he turns five, I doubt that he will have "accepted jesus", which means every baby and toddler that has died before accepting christ is now burning forever in hell. A bit of a disturbing thought, isn't it? This also means mentally handicapped that just don't understand the concept of religion, they have never accepted christ, so they go to hell.

This is mainly why I don't believe in the christian god. Also, because of the "infinite life" that is promised by the bible. Say for yourself, would you really like infinite life? Even in heaven? I know I wouldn't... Yes, maybe the first million years, then another million years, well nice. Then you have an infinity ahead of you, and another infinity, etc. What makes life worth living to me, is the fact that we die, if we never die, as the bible says is the case in heaven and hell, life will become boring. There is nothing special, because if you have an infinity of life, even in heaven, after a while you have just seen it all... This is why we must accept that we will die and not go to heaven, or to hell, or purgatory. We just die. That's it, game over. This is what makes life worth living: You have a limited ammount of time. You must not waste this life by praying to a god or something, you must live this life to the fullest, helping your fellow man, making this world a better one for the coming generations.

In the same chapter of Hebrews (11), it says:

"But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him."
Hebrews 11:6

By saying that "atheism requires faith," you are taking the word faith out of the Christian context. If atheists and Christians both have faith, it is in a completely different sense of the word.

Please, stop deferring to the inerrancy of biblical authority to 'support' your argument.

Unless you actually believe that it is inviolable and correct in every regard?

If so, perhaps you can resolve one or two of its internal contradictions?

There's no need to jump down his throat for referring to the bible in this context. He isn't using it to prove that the earth is flat or that chalk is cheese. He's merely illustrating that the Christian definition of "faith" is inapplicable to atheists if one were to say that both Christians and atheists have faith.

Yeah, talk about completely missing the point.

I wonder if your post would be worth a new topic...? I for one long for that which may be outside our grasp: Immortality. I do want to live damn near forever. Two hundred, three hundred, five hundred, a thousand years... I want to be alive when Mars is colonized and when warp travel is invented.

I do agree with you that, overall, religion tends to "cheapen" life because it makes too much focus on the afterlife. And that cannot be proven or shown in any way shape or form. Life is a precious gift, and throwing it away for faith means you've squandered it.

Indeed, I'd definitely like a lifespan that's as long as I want it to be (which I'm not sure if that makes sense, but basically I would like to live until I decide I've lived long enough), but living for a thousand years - well look at the state of many people who're 80 - their best days are behind them - talking about 500 hundred or a thousand would be... odd. That said, if you could carry on with good health it'd be fine, though then you're presented with the problems of overpopulation to a much greater degree, as if we can all not die then you're taking mortality out of the equation - there would have to be some sort of imposition of laws on children.

Though to be honest, living forever would have the greatest benefit of all: you'd never have to turn off Witchcraft's first album. EVER.

Well, there are actual theories that by 2050, one may be able to transfer his consciousness into a computer. Rest in there long enough--with enough time for technology to grow, and one would be able to transfer that consciousness out of the computer and into a clone or a robot. The new body could be genetically engineered to live much longer than a normal human.

And this is the life I want to work toward. Immortality through science.


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Sort of like Walt Disney being cryofrozen until they can cure whatever it is he was dying of? Awesome. As long as I can keep my hair.

Though it still does raise the questions of "Where will all the people go?" Unless we can develop flying cars like in The Jetsons, which would actually be THE TITS.

Fuckin' A. Some say, "wouldn't living forever get boring at some point?" If you can go into some temporary (albeit long-lasting) stasis, I imagine that one could have equally eternal pleasure. One would be able to ascend to god status (which, in a narcissistic way is very desirable), and as long as I didn't age infinitely as well, and what aging does occur can be reversed (which it would be able to), I'd be fine with eternal life even if means other than physiological death ("old age") can kill me.

I can't see anything wrong with living forever, provided that you didn't age constantly, or along with never dying, you didn't have a completely incapable of death thing, such as being invulnerable. So if it did eventually get to the point that you didn't want to live any more, it was still possible get out (not to mention it would stop the world from degrading into mayhem). Sure living forever would get boring at some point, but honestly, I feel a little boredom still makes up for living past 80.

Except that I don't think Walt Disney was actually frozen. I think that's an urban legend. Ted Williams on the other hand...

Well, just make sure you don't hold out on science advancing that fast. You need to accept (and not just know- everyone knows, the trouble is most people don't really believe they will die, just as in they don't believe they will get cancer, get in a car wreck, have their house burn down, etc.- it couldn't happen to them!) that you're going to die someday. Otherwise death will sneak up on you and you probably won't have lived life the way you should have, in retrospect. To quote Morrie: "Learn How to Die; Learn How to Live".

I've already been in a car accident and large sections of my apartment building burned down twice in a matter of six months (luckily never making it to my end of the building). Also, I am going to be in Iraq next year. Reality is something I'm very familiar with.

History has shown that we should not trust technological prognostications. They are almost always wrong. 50 years ago, the same type of person who believes that we will be able to store consciousness in a computer 50 years from now thought that by 2000, we'd travel in flying cars and would've already colonized space. When AI was first being developed as a discipline, experts thought that we would soon have AI on par with human intelligence. Don't buy the hype!

Yeah, I still want my flying cars.

Technological advancement has more to do with the needs of the market and social considerations than theoretical ability. Nobody really needs flying cars because it is difficult for the common citizen to become a pilot and because its risky (development should cost fortunes and its difficult to get it into the market). Similarly, there's no economical use for advanced AI that I can immediately think of. In short, if there was a demand for these things, they might not actually exist by now but we would be significantly closer to obtain them.

True. We'll NEVER have flying cars because they're not feasible.

It seems as if we have a non-trolling new member. Nice.

Good luck with that. While im sure well be able to do it by 2050, it will logically be severely expensive and in high demand. I would start saving now if I cared enough about it, but immortality/extended life doesn't interest me very much.
Now, the idea of transferring to a computer is interesting - I would enjoy that. But I wouldnt want it to be permanent.

I read the internal contradictions. A lot of them are subjective to interpretations or resolvable through the "new covenant" theory (that Jesus changed the Old Testament law, basically).

I beg to differ. If we had advanced AI, it could replace humans in the workplace and companies wouldn't need to pay it.

That would be nice.

It would also create a large problem - less jobs equals more people with no money, and as a result sales dropping because people have no money with which to buy things, thus a severe drop in sales leading to decreased revenue for the companies.

Ah, but robots need maintenance too, and that creates work... unless all robots are self-sufficient, self-aware and don't need humans anymore, in which case we have reached singularity and we're probably fucked.

Really, consider the fact that we have automated many processes which used to be done through manual labour... but is there really LESS work? Not even remotely. When we run out of things to do, we invent them.

Heh, true, and there's more of us now than there was when it was still done manually.

HAHA!! That sounds like a Doomsday prophecy. Luckily things don't work like that.

Of course we would, but technological advancement is gradual and there's no financial gain from slightly improved versions that are closer to, say, beat the Turing test. Investment in AI only works in the very long run. I can't think of any economical use for an AI that's as smart as a retarded person, and yet it would cost fortunes. On the other hand, take the space race as an example; if it weren't for the cold war, nobody would have landed on the moon.

I can see no reason why advanced AI should not be theoretically possible. Our brains don't work with magic.

Yes, I considered that. I suppose people would all switch from doind manual labor jobs into more business skills, artistic, etc. jobs. It would damage the economy, but overall i think we would thrive in the end.
But it would open new jobs for maintenance of the machines, (assuming other machines couldn't do that), sale of robotic upgrades, etc. I assume that the AI robots couldnt be trusted to design other AI robots. Sounding a little sci-fi here, but I suppose they would try to reprogram themselves to be superior to huamns and rebel. The robots intelligence would ahve to eb inferior to humans in order to keep them submissive.

It would take years to perfect of course. I would assume it to take about 100 years between the Introduction of AI technology and the point of having a full electronic duplicate of a human mind. Once we reach that point the computers would still evolve (since technology is forever increasing) while our minds remained the same, and soon we have computers smarter than us.
Now thats a nice, cliched, doomsday prophecy.

First of all, BM_DM, you're retarded. In reference to cda6590again "deferring to the inerrancy of biblical authority to 'support' your argument," he was merely re-evaluating what the FIRST post of this whole discussion stated exactly. Maybe if you had read the FIRST post to begin with, you would be well inclined to conjecture to this; but apparently you did not.

Secondly, when people refer to God of the Christian text as "god," why can't they first realize that even if he is not real, he is still symbolic in regard to much of the things that have EVER happened in history: good or bad? And, he is just as much fictional to non-believers as non-fictional to believers of him, thus he is still supposed to be written (or typed) as "God," not "god." And though these people know this, they outright lower-case the g in God to prove that they, themselves, are all-knowing and all-powerful enough to change what is universally a proper noun. Depending on how badly they hate God, it's still a damn proper noun. Now check this as I attempt to do the same to many of the dogmatic, inherent believers of the following: nietzsche, darwin, freud, lavey, marx, stalin, satan...hey, anybody can do it if they don't like these people! Check it out kiddies! Are all you readers of this hurt yet? Are your eyes bleeding? ...siddhartha, rousseau, hesse, wotan, bush, krasicki, obama

lol

You've just opened a Pandora's box of frightfully bad grammar! What have you done?!

I agree with you, but you're making my point. Technophiles think that things are a lot easier to invent than they really are and they make the mistake you mentioned earlier too (they think things will be invented in the future which are expensive, difficult to design, and serve little or no purpose). Putting the contents of your brain on a computer is not going to happen by 2050. We are nowhere even near artificially simulating the cognitive processes of the human brain. Neuroscience doesn't even have a good grasp on many of them.



They do not work on magic, but that does not mean that their equivalent can be created inorganically. In the early days of AI, researchers were focused on functional interactions between cognitive processes. They worked on the syntax, on the software as opposed to the hardware (think of the hardware as the piece of meat that is the brain). However, more recently, researchers are focusing on the physical properties of the human brain, those studied by neuroscience. This research focus led to 'connectionism' or AI that is less like our PCs or calculators and more like a brain. This trend exploded in the 1980s and is connected to eliminative materialism in philosophy of mind. It is an interesting development, but it still has a very long way to go. The neural networks used in connectionist models are far from approximating the complex interactions between human neurons.

Before I digress excessively, the point is that artificial intelligence very well might need to be closely modeled on us and if so, it's not clear how 'artificial' it is. I don't think it's very likely that we'll be able to build a highly intelligent thing the same way my computer was built, but more complicated.

I'm only saying that technology does not increase according to its theoretical ability, and just because something has not been achieved does not mean it is impossible in principle. When traffic congestion becomes problematic because of overpopulation, the market might introduce flying cars. The case of AI is extremely problematic for the reasons I mentioned but under different circumstances - say, a totalitarian regime that would enslave humanity for the sole purpose of building an intelligent computer - it may have existed by now.

A normal computer might be able to simulate the brain, in the same way it can simulate any other finite system. A Turing machine can do that.